@religion-is-a-mental-illness / religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Jul 5, 2024
Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.
This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.
Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.
Take the example of Dr Hillary Cass, now deservedly elevated to the House of Lords, whose review into paediatric “gender medicine” has catalysed a sea-change in public perception. While many medical journals and institutions are so ideologically captured that they have continued to deny the significance of Cass’s findings - preferring instead to continue with discredited and evidence-free “gender-affirming care” - the Labour Party has pledged to implement her recommendations. Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary and potential future leader of the Labour Party (who narrowly held on to his Ilford North seat last night by a little over 500 votes), has made clear that the Cass Review will guide Labour policy. Starmer, meanwhile, has turned a blind eye to the bullying of MP Rosie Duffield within his own party and has expressed very little understanding of the issues. He has come around to the view that 99.9% of women “don’t have a penis”, which is still approximately 33,500 female penises in the UK alone. This is our new Prime Minister.
And here is Nadia Whittome, who has just been returned in Nottingham East, claiming that Labour will push through gender self-identification with “no ifs, no buts” and “resist calls to exclude trans women from women’s spaces”.
Such a system would have seen double rapist Adam Graham – who identified as Isla Bryson once he had popped on a blonde wig and pink leggings – accommodated in a women’s prison. Whittome also calls for a “ban on conversion therapy” with “no exemptions”. Such a policy would likely criminalise those health professionals who follow the recommendations of the Cass Review and take a psychotherapeutic approach when it comes to confused and vulnerable children. You can read my piece on why a ban on trans conversion therapy is effectively a new form of gay conversion therapy here.
Anneliese Dodds, who won her seat in Oxford East last night, has continually shown that she has a meagre grasp on gender identity ideology and why it represents such a threat to the rights of women and gay people. She has stated that “Labour will ban conversion practices outright”, in spite of appeals from groups such as Sex Matters and LGB Alliance to rethink this position. It is as though she is determined not to read the Cass Review, which was unequivocal on this matter:
“The intent of psychological intervention is not to change the person’s perception of who they are but to work with them to explore their concerns and experiences and help alleviate their distress, regardless of whether they pursue a medical pathway or not. It is harmful to equate this approach to conversion therapy as it may prevent young people from getting the emotional support they deserve.”
And yet Labour politicians continue to push for a ban on “conversion therapy” which could put parents and doctors on the wrong side of the law simply for rejecting harmful “gender-affirming care”. One can only hope that leading figures in the new Labour government read over this policy response to its manifesto by the Gay Men’s Network and reflect on the issues.
Labour is also promising to implement its Race Equality Act, a regressive policy which will effectively prioritise equality of outcome over equality of opportunity (in other words, “equity” rather than equality). Labour wishes to ensure that those from ethnic minorities are entitled to “full right to equal pay”, somehow not realising that this has been enshrined in law since 1965. As Kemi Badenoch has pointed out, “Labour’s proposed new race law will set people against each other and see millions wasted on pointless red tape. It is obviously already illegal to pay someone less because of their race. The new law would be a bonanza for dodgy, activist lawyers.”
Labour is taking its lead from Critical Race Theory in assuming that all disparities in outcome are evidence of systemic racism. This faith-based position was challenged by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which found that there is no evidence at all that the legal and educational systems of this country are rigged against minorities. Activists were so furious that the facts went against their precious narrative that the commission’s chairman, Tony Sewell, was compared to Joseph Goebbels and the Ku Klux Klan. These privileged and predominately white “woke” activists simply cannot tolerate black people who don’t know their place.
And so under Labour we are likely to see these racially divisive ideas implemented under the guise of “anti-racism”. In its manifesto, Labour also pledged to “reverse the Conservatives’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate”. This looks very much like an insinuation that the party will reinstate police recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, a clear affront to freedom of expression. It is a staple of “woke” activism that censorship is necessary to ensure social justice. Given Labour’s ideological steer, it is likely that under its watch free speech will erode even further.
I very much hope to be proven wrong in all of this, and that Labour will learn to reject the regressive and divisive influence of intersectional identity politics. The Tories were bad enough, with their restrictions on peaceful protest and their attacks on free speech via the Online Safety Bill. But now we have a government whose authoritarian instincts are even more pronounced. Progress is often an inchmeal affair, and sometimes we have to suffer the occasional retrograde lapses along the way. So we would be wise to brace ourselves for the next few years. For now at least, the culture warriors have the upper hand.
==
If you want to see where the UK is heading, look where Canada is now.
Reminder: these are the definitions promoted by the newest generation of virulently anti-gay organizations.
"Okay, I know you guys are gonna tell me I'm crazy, but I think all gay men would benefit from a gender transition. And it's like, guys, not being gay literally saved my life. It saved my life you guys, and it's like, as a gay man think of all the benefits for you, right.
You get to go through your life without dealing with homophobia or discrimination, you get to date straight guys, and you don't have to deal with, like, being seen as abnormal for being your feminine self. You know, you can be feminine and you're just gonna a be a feminine woman, right.
And it's like, honestly, in the year of 2024, maybe being gay is an outdated concept. Maybe it's just an outdated concept. Because why are we allowing people to live in a dark room where they're seen as a minority when we have the medical advances to make them like the majority, to have a successful gender transition and to live a normal life."
==
Kelly Cadigan is a gay man (look at the hands) who's saying the quiet part out loud.
Literally, trans the gay away. There are still people who insist that nobody is saying this. Those people aren't mistaken or ignorant, they're liars.
By: Joseph Burgo
Published: Jun 12, 2024
In the United States, we don’t often hear about the young male refugees from genderism who have an artificial “neo-vagina” in their pubic area instead of a penis.
Newspaper articles regularly profile young women such as Chloe Cole, Prisha Mosley, and Camille Kiefel who lost their breasts to medical malpractice and have since brought suit, but you don’t often hear about the castrated men. Photos of Michelle Alleva’s scarred chest regularly show up on my X timeline, but for obvious reasons, regretful men don’t usually share pictures of their intimate body parts post-surgery.
On June 4, 2024, Prisha announced via X that she’d given birth to a son. While the world empathizes with her grief that she’ll never be able to enjoy breastfeeding her baby, we share her relief that “gender-affirming care” didn’t destroy her fertility. Prisha’s story mingles feelings of regret and triumph, of loss and joy—an ultimately uplifting tale of healthy motherhood and a new life.
In short, Prisha may have taken a detour into genderism and suffered a poignant loss, but now she’s back on track and able to enjoy a loving relationship with her baby.
For the men in my practice who faced up, too late, to being gay, there’s no going back. Going forward (what’s deceptively referred to as “transition”) turned out to be an illusion, but how do they “go back”—that is, take up the life of a gay man when they no longer have a penis?
Warning: the following descriptions might make some readers deeply uncomfortable. I advise them to keep reading and I promise to keep disturbing details to a minimum.
In the surgical procedure known as a “penile inversion vaginoplasty” (PIV), a man’s penis is sliced open and used (sometimes along with scrotal tissue) to line an artificial cavity created in the pubic area. Typically referred to as a neo-vagina, it’s a surgically-created wound which must be regularly dilated to prevent the body from trying to heal it—that is, to close it up because the body senses that it doesn’t belong there. In addition to penile skin grafts, intestinal tissue may sometimes be used to line the neo-vagina. During the operation, surgeons relocate the prostate away from its normal position below the bladder and in front of the rectum.
The operation is irreversible, obviously, just as a double mastectomy can’t be undone. Prisha can’t recover her healthy breasts, and my male clients will never again have a functioning penis.
Administration of cross-sex hormones is part of the usual protocol for men undergoing PIV, both pre- and post-op; among the side-effects are brain fog, and sometimes a complete loss of or profound diminishment in sexual desire. In some cases, the surgically created neo-vagina is too small for penetrative sex; for others, such sex is painful or unsatisfying.
In short, for many gay men, so-called “gender affirming care” has deprived them of a satisfying sex life. I acknowledge that not all men with a neo-vagina report the same dissatisfaction, but I haven’t seen them in my practice.
To combat the brain fog associated with estrogen, some male clients try adding a small dose of testosterone to their hormone regime. The effects can be troubling. One client felt simultaneously aroused and perturbed: while the nerves from his former penis had been preserved during surgery, they were no longer “where they were supposed to be,” as he put it. Another suffered from “phantom penis syndrome,” a condition akin to phantom limb syndrome where the person experiences hallucinatory sensations of a lost body part. A third felt intense desire to take part in receptive anal intercourse, only to find it painful (due to a post-op fistula) and unstimulating because his prostate had been relocated away from the rectal area. For these men, achieving orgasm is quite difficult and often leads to painful after-sensations in the genital area.
The idea of anal intercourse between two men makes some readers uncomfortable, and I believe that’s an additional reason why we hear so little about the male victims of genderism. Members of the public with conservative religious views who regard homosexuality as a sin will naturally find it hard to empathize. Straight females such as Laura Becker who lost their breasts to medical malpractice earn public sympathy and acclaim, but the plight of post-operative gay men is largely met with silence.
In the United Kingdom, gay man Ritchie Herron has spoken with feeling about his loss of sexual function post PIV. In a poignant X thread from 2022, he says:
I have no sensation in my crotch region at all. No one told me that the base of your penis is left, it can’t be removed – meaning you’re left with a literal stump inside that twitches. When you take Testosterone and your libido returns, you wake up with morning wood, without the tree. And if you do take testosterone after being post op, you run the risk of internal hair in the neo-vagina. Imagine dealing with internal hair growth after everything? What a choice … be healthy on Testosterone and a freak, or remain a sexless eunuch. And thats something that will never come back …
For the full horror of what it means to be caught in this nightmarish limbo, read the complete and powerful thread.
Realizing post-surgery that you’re actually a gay man means you’re caught in an impossible space. You learned, too late, that so-called “transition” is a lie, but the full-spectrum life of a gay man is foreclosed to you. You’re unlikely to have a satisfying relationship with another gay man because, to be frank, gay men are attracted to male bodies that have penises, full stop, despite what the genderists will tell you. If you do try to date, your options have narrowed. As one of my clients puts it, your dating pool usually shrinks down to “chasers”—that is, men who will seek out and fetishize you, often reducing you to your anatomy rather than seeing you as whole person.
Psychotherapy with these men means sitting with them in a complex and deeply painful place, what I’ve called an impossible space, sharing the grief of immense loss without succumbing to despair. As with anyone who has ever experienced a profound and irremediable loss, my clients must nonetheless pursue a meaningful existence and find creative ways to feel good about themselves. It’s my job is to help them as best I can. I often find that sitting with them in their pain without minimizing it is what helps the most.
In a way, Prisha’s story is a classic tale of triumph over adversity, of new life beyond a death cult. This is the kind of story the public enjoys, and it’s one of the main reasons she and other young women in her position receive so much attention. The gay men in my practice have a far less satisfying and more complex story to tell, and one I fear the public has limited interest in hearing.
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Jun 4, 2024
Here we go again. The culture war is apparently nothing more than a myth, a fabrication intended to distract the lower orders. It’s like the “bread and circuses” of Ancient Rome, or the Easter Bunny, or Milli Vanilli.
On this week’s episode of Newsnight, the former Tory MP Dehenna Davison was asked whether she welcomed Kemi Badenoch’s recent attempts to clarify the Equality Act in order to ensure that women’s rights to single-sex spaces are protected. “I don’t at all,” she said. “I think regrettably the debate around trans issues right now seems to be used as some kind of political football for this mythical culture war that the Conservative party seems to be fighting.”
That’s a relief. So the disabled women who are smeared as bigots for requesting female carers are simply fantasists? And the female prisoners who are terrified of being accommodated with convicted rapists are just worrying over nothing? And victims of sexual assault being turned away from rape crisis centres because they don’t want to speak to a male counsellor have just imagined the whole thing?
Apparently, yes. Here’s what the Tory Reform Group had to say in a post on X:
“The Conservative Party has to think very carefully about the type of campaign it wants to run, and the longer term impact of stoking culture wars. It is clear that voters are rejecting the politics of division. We must not run on ‘wedge issues’ for a narrow core voter base alone.”
I remain unconvinced that the rights of 51% of the population qualifies as a “wedge issue”.
Of course the culture war doesn’t end with the ongoing erosion of women’s rights. Gay people are being shamed for being attracted to their own sex by the very organisations who were set up to protect their interests. We have men demanding access to lesbian dating apps and speed-dating events. We’ve had gay youth medicalised on the NHS for being same-sex attracted. We have the bullying and harassment of gay men and lesbians in the name of “progress”. And yet in her Newsnight interview, Davison claims that same-sex marriage is one of the Conservative government’s “proudest achievements” while in the same breath dismissing these attacks on gay rights as trivial.
And what about the ongoing assault on free speech? What of those activists who demand that we should be prosecuted if we do not adopt their language (something that is actually happening in Canada and is likely to come to Ireland with the proposed new “hate speech” laws)? And what about campaigners who now leverage huge influence in all our major institutions attempting to rewrite our history, remove statues and monuments that they find “problematic”, censor books, and criminalise dissent? What about the ideologues in schools who are teaching highly contested theories as fact, from Critical Race Theory via Brighton School Council’s “anti-racist schools strategy” to this week’s revelation that 95% of Scottish schools are allowing pupils to self-identify their gender?
At this point, it’s difficult to believe that anyone genuinely believes that the culture war is “mythical”. There is an abundance of evidence of the antics of culture warriors who seek to reconstruct all the fundamental aspects of our society in order to better align with their ideology. I do make a point of assuming that people are telling the truth, and so the charitable explanation is that Davison and her ilk are simply ignorant of some of the most significant cultural developments over the past decade, from the fallout of the Black Lives Matter protests to the Scottish hate crime bill to the campaigns of harassment against gender-critical feminists. Perhaps she doesn’t read the newspapers. If only someone had written a book that provides a wide-ranging overview of the countless examples of how culture warriors have sought to reshape the world. Oh well…
Of course Davison is not the only political commentator to imply that the rights of women and gay people simply don’t matter. Former Labour strategist Alastair Campbell was quick to jump on to X to offer his contribution:
“I’m sure the world of trade and business will take note that the actual Secretary of State for trade and business has decided that the biggest issue on her agenda on her first big election outing is the weaponisation of trans rights. Anyone might be tempted to think Kemi Badenoch has less interest in the general election than the internal ideological shitshow likely to follow.”
As J. K. Rowling pointed out, Campbell seems to be unaware that Badenoch is also the minister for women and equalities, and so it’s hardly a stretch to suppose that women’s rights and the Equality Act fall within her remit. As Rowling put it: “Thanks once again for highlighting Labour’s complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate.”
The culture war is often misunderstood as a matter of Right vs Left, but the ill-informed comments of Davison and Campbell show that it’s nothing of the kind. As I have pointed out many times, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of the culture war during their time in office. We shouldn’t give them a free pass simply because matters are likely to get a whole lot worse under Labour.
Far from being trivial, these issues could not be more important. If we can’t preserve the rights of women and gay people, how can we claim to be living in a civilised society? And when activists are successfully pressurising governments to force citizens to declare falsehoods, how can we in good conscience remain silent?
The claim that the culture was is a “distraction” is, in itself, a distraction. Yes, other issues are crucial and require our attention. But resisting the creeping authoritarianism of our times should also be a priority. When those in power are not only insisting that 2+2=5, but demanding that we all repeat the lie, we cannot afford to be complacent.
Colin Wright: I'm coming from this classical liberal side where, and I thought we were achieving a lot of success in this idea that we were correctly identifying that there was a lot of variation in the degree to which people conform to sex stereotypes - there's masculine and feminine girls, masculine and feminine boys.
And we were at least going in the direction as a society of saying, that's completely normal, if you don't like that, deal with it. Like, these people exist and we should accept them.
And now we've kind of just gone the complete opposite. We're saying, well the boy who's very feminine, you're no longer a boy, you're actually a girl, you're stuck on the wrong body and we need to change you.
I'm just for the hands-off principle. Like, these are just normal people, these are just-- this is just natural variation and we need to let them be who they are. But then they would interpret "be who you are" as like, well they're born in the wrong body, so being who they are is modifying.
Andrew Gold: It's sort of-- I feel like there's authoritarianism coming from a benevolent dictator...
Wright: It was on the right path and then it just somehow, just totally got derailed and that's when I jumped off the train before it went off over the cliff.
Gold: Humans in big groups, they're just always going to do that, they're always going to start telling people they're in the wrong body, they're in the wrong thing, there's something wrong with who they are.
Both the right and the left have a really big problem with gender non-conforming individuals. You had the people on the far Christian right who don't like their feminine sons potentially being homosexual, and so they tried to change their brains to match your body, you know try to change your behaviors.
And then on the far left we have just the opposite, where they're, you know, they claimed to be accepting of it but now they're saying, well we need to change your body to match your brain.
It's just two ways to achieve the same end result basically.
--
Full episode:
By: Dennis Kavanagh
Published: Jun 6, 2024
This year’s Pride Month has rarely seemed so pointless. After all, only the truly shameless in the LGBT activist set could feel any pride in 2024 – a year in which the rainbow-flag fliers’ betrayal of gay youngsters in the name of gender ideology was laid bare.
The publication of the Cass Review in April exposed the scandal of the NHS’s treatment of ‘gender confused’ kids. It showed how the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) subjected troubled, often gay youngsters to life-altering hormones, drugs and treatments. Yet when these same-sex-attracted young people needed a gay movement, it failed them. Stonewall, its principal representative, actively cheered on those encouraging gay youngsters to believe they were born in the wrong body. Former Stonewall CEO Ruth Hunt even warned parents that half their gender-distressed children would commit suicide without puberty blockers. At the same time, leading sections of the gay movement turned on anyone questioning the trans agenda.
You won’t see any reflection on this betrayal of gays and lesbians during Pride Month. There will be no recognition that by embracing gender ideology, the gay-rights movement of today has undermined the gay rights of tomorrow. Instead, an unholy alliance of corporates, trade unions and parading gendercrats will spend weeks celebrating their supposed virtue, while remaining oblivious to the absurdity and growing unpopularity of the movement they represent.
Don’t let the ubiquitous Pride flag fool you over the coming weeks into thinking this is a successful movement. How strong can a ‘gay rights’ movement be if it has allowed its next generation to be chemically castrated? How strong can a movement be that has allowed lesbians like Kathleen Stock or Julie Bindel to be deplatformed, harassed and sacked for standing up to gender ideology?
The new ‘Progress Pride’ flag tells the story of the movement’s corruption. A new trans chevron makes an ugly incursion from the left, with an ‘intersex-inclusive’ purple circle placed on top of it (despite some intersex activists asking not to be included). This is more of a logo now and less of a flag. It symbolises the hostile takeover of the gay-rights movement by gender-identity ideology.
Pride was once our answer to shame. The riposte to being kicked out of your home for coming out. The retort to everyday incidents of homophobia, which are now thankfully a thing of the past in the UK and the West.
Today’s Pride is different. It is not a response to a sense of shame. It is a false pride born of shamelessness. A pride fuelled by the self-righteous embrace of the cause of trans rights. Think of Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley calling lesbians ‘sexual racists’ in 2021 for not wanting to have sex with biological males. Think of those happily suppressing moderate gay voices for warning that ‘conversion-therapy bans’ simply criminalise ordinary therapy for gender-confused youth. Or how Stonewall did everything in its power to hound gender-critical barrister Allison Bailey out of a job.
If one must take pride in anything during Pride Month, I prefer to find it in the spirited and steadfast work of women and gay people in the UK who, against all the odds, have taken on gender ideology and its champions within the gay movement. Organisations like LGB Alliance and the Gay Men’s Network, which I direct, have done sterling work in defending gay rights from the predations of gender ideology. It has been tough. We have had to battle against an elite consensus. It wasn’t that long ago that both Theresa May and, later, Sir Keir Starmer were promising Pink News that gender self-identification would become law. Now, in part thanks to the efforts of gay-rights activists and gender-critical feminists, the sitting and shadow secretaries of state for health and social care are committed to implementing the findings of the Cass Review.
Pride, the holy month of the rainbow, is now a thoroughly rudderless affair. Its foolish embrace of the specious cause of trans rights has cost it dear. This increasingly silly party now takes place against the backdrop of a generation-defining medical scandal that Pride and its backers endorsed. Even Stonewall seems cowed. It certainly seems less keen to pronounce that transing a two-year-old is a good idea than it was just a few years ago.
Pride should parade its way into irrelevance. The gay-rights activism of the future will need to look very different.
Dennis Kavanagh is a director of Gay Men’s Network.
By: Geraldine Scott
Published: Apr 19, 2024
A decade ago, as same-sex marriage became legal, Stonewall was riding high.
Lauded for its key role in pushing for equal rights and campaigning prowess, it was helping government departments and schools expand their diversity offering and become more welcoming to all.
Now, the NHS has distanced itself and other public bodies are reviewing their associations with the charity, as the fallout from a landmark report on gender identity shines a spotlight on the organisation.
Stonewall, Britain’s most well-known LGBT rights charity, has come under intense scrutiny for its stance on trans rights since the publication of the report by Dr Hilary Cass.
Campaigning for transgender people became a key part of Stonewall’s offering from 2015, including backing the prescription of “puberty blockers” for transgender teenagers.
The Times revealed last week that the charity had tried to suppress early warnings to schools about the shaky evidence base, telling teachers to shred a resource pack which highlighted potential dangers.
But Cass found that children experiencing gender distress and wanting to transition had been let down by a lack of research and “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions.
She said studies had been “exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint” and there was a “toxicity” in discussions, with young people being caught in “stormy social discourse”.
Critics have put some of the blame for that at Stonewall’s door.
Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, who ran Stonewall between 2014 and 2019, said in an interview with The Times that she had never attempted to shut down debate and that her only regret was trusting the “experts”. She said she did not recognise the characterisation of Stonewall as being a bullying campaign group.
But one source close to the charity said it was Stonewall’s increasing stance of “demanding” change rather than campaigning and enabling progress to be made that had caused issues.
They said: “What Stonewall does now is ‘we demand you agree with this, we demand you agree with that, we demand the next thing’, and it just doesn’t enable that bigger principle which is ‘what support should we be giving to some young people and vulnerable young adults so that they can make the best decisions for their life?’”
They added: “Some people think it shouldn’t be campaigning on trans rights at all, I think that’s up to it and that’s not my point. My point is that actually it just didn’t build broad alliances and it absolutely did no debate.”
Responding to the report, Stonewall said Cass’s recommendations could “make a positive impact” if implemented properly.
But in a review of the recommendations published on Thursday it said hormones and puberty blockers should still be prescribed to children and young people in a “timely manner” — against Cass’s recommendations — if supported by a medical practitioner. In a sign that the charity’s influence is waning, The Times understands NHS England has distanced itself from the organisation, cancelling conference tickets and a planned membership of the charity’s Diversity Champions Scheme.
An NHS spokesperson said: “After consideration, NHS England took the decision to not renew its membership with Stonewall last year.”
Other quangos which The Times revealed last month had kept their memberships, despite a government diktat to withdraw from the scheme, are now reviewing their associations.
Sport England had been part of the Diversity Champions Scheme, which brought in £3.9 million for Stonewall last year. But a spokesman told The Times: “We have reviewed the partnership and Sport England will not be renewing membership.
“As a public body which scrutinises how we spend every penny of public funds, this decision has been taken with value for money as our primary concern.”
Historic England had also paid £3,000 a year for the scheme. It said it was also reviewing whether to renew its membership “based on a value-for-money test” with the Stonewall partnership due to end this month.
Arts Council England, which had a three-month membership which ended in October, is also no longer part of the scheme.
Other government departments have also withdrawn from the scheme over the years, and Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, said last year: “We have engaged with numerous LGBT groups, but the fact of the matter is that many of them support self-ID.
“That is not this government’s policy. Stonewall does not decide the law in this country.”
A government source added: “Stonewall has gone from being a leading civil rights organisation, to the leading pusher of the dangerous trans ideology that led to the outrageous events documented in the Cass Review.”
They said the government had “made it clear that Stonewall’s divisive schemes aren’t welcome in Whitehall” but that some arms-length bodies and civil society groups still handed over funds. “This needs to stop,” they said.
Stonewall was contacted for comment.
[ Via: https://archive.today/JPW3t ]
==
Stonewall was running a full-blown protection racket.
By: Joseph Burgo, Ph.D.
Published: May 13, 2024
Young gays and lesbians can’t help but feel ashamed of being different, and a major part of their journey into adulthood and self-acceptance involves coming to terms with that difference.
For my entire career, I’ve chosen not to write for academic journals because I can’t bring myself to adopt the “scientific” writing style and terminology expected of contributors. Take internalized homophobia, for example. We hear and read this expression every day without quite acknowledging what it’s supposed to describe: intensely painful feelings of shame and self-loathing. But internalized homophobia is what journal editors expect to read when you submit an article for consideration.
I find it frustrating that publications in a discipline focused on the human experience so often come across as void of feeling. For that reason, I’ve written books for popular audiences instead of my colleagues because I’d rather connect with readers through evocative language than adopt a style that feels unnatural to me. I prefer words most of us would use in everyday life, or descriptions I might use if I were writing fiction.
By contrast, internalized homophobia implies that a pervasive societal attitude called “homophobia” (a misleading word itself because no irrational fear is involved) gets absorbed and adopted within the individual psyche. You can even diagram it! External attitude → internal self-concept. By using this expression, we’ve completely stripped away the quality of the emotional experience with denatured, supposedly more scientific language.
What does internalized homophobia mean for the person who experiences it? What words might he or she use?
There’s something wrong with me because I’m different from everyone I know.
I’d give almost anything to be somebody else, somebody normal.
I feel like I’m so screwed up that sometimes I’d like to die.
Or disappear.
The sound of my voice and the way I walk fill me with self-loathing.
I’m a freak and I don’t fit in.
I hate myself.
I could go on, but these are some of the immediate emotional experiences of gays and lesbians afflicted by so-called internalized homophobia.
Even young gays and lesbians who are more gender conforming, those kids who aren’t bullied because of their obvious difference, will inevitably feel shame about their sexual orientation, and it doesn’t necessarily depend upon absorbing an external negative evaluation. Gay kids brought up in the most accepting environments can’t help but feel a sense of shame, at least in the beginning, because being homosexual makes them different from the majority; it singles them out in an unfavorable way.
Shame emotions arise for varying reasons and in different situations, as I explain in my book on shame. I refer to one of those situations as Exclusion—feeling yourself to be on the outside of a group to which you’d like to belong. Another one I call Unwanted Exposure, which needs no explanation. The fact of the matter is—most human beings are both heterosexual and gender-typical; especially in conformist middle and high school, we’d rather be like everyone else so we can fit in, so finding that we’re different makes us feel ashamed. Inevitably. If our mannerisms and body movements cause us to stand out, Unwanted Exposure may inspire excruciating shame and self-loathing.
In other words, gay shame is unavoidable, even if one conforms to gender norms and has avoided the bullies. Young gays and lesbians can’t help but feel ashamed of being different, at least at first, even in a relatively tolerant society, and a major part of their journey into adulthood and self-acceptance involves coming to terms with that difference, celebrating the peculiar advantages of being outside the norm without making light of the downsides, and building pride in ourselves without reference to our sexual orientation.
* * *
But do not get me wrong—widespread homophobia in society is still with us.
Since the advent of legalized gay marriage as well as the commonplace depiction of gay characters and relationships in media, many liberal-minded people have the mistaken impression that societal acceptance is the norm and it’s easy to “come out” as gay these days. Wrong. A troubling number of men and women, even psychotherapists working with gender-confused children, have a visceral disgust at the thought of same sex relationships; many if not most gender non-conforming kids are bullied in middle and high school, just as they’ve always been.
At least until they “come out” as trans.
We know from Hannah Barnes’ book and the Cass Review that up to 80 percent of the kids treated at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) were same sex attracted. Genderists might argue that … well, of course they are because they’re trapped in the wrong body. According to this view, some people who happened to have been “assigned” female at birth may have a male gender identity and be attracted to women; after undergoing medicalized transition to align body and gender identity, he will be heterosexual and therefore “normal.”
As many have noted before me, gender identity ideology is deeply homophobic at heart.
We’ve all read about the dark jokes at GIDS, that soon there would be no gays left—hence the expression transing away the gay. In recent testimony before a committee of the Scottish government, Hillary Cass spoke of her surprise at finding “how much phobia there still is.” She went on to give the example of a young biological male who had begun transition early on: “She’s doing well, she had puberty blockers at the earliest stage, she had feminising hormones at the earliest stage and she passes very well as a woman, but with hindsight she knows she was a boy with intense internalised homophobia and was gay.” Dr. Cass adds: “But at this point in her life she's clearly not going to de-transition.” How could she?
In my psychotherapy practice, I work with several such men:
In previous essays, I’ve written about the other men in my practice—the straight ones who struggle with autogynephilia, as well as largely heterosexual boys who are on the spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent. While I feel angry on behalf of all my clients for the lies they were told by the genderists, I can become incandescent with rage when I think about the gay men in my practice encouraged to reject themselves as homosexual, forever deprived of a healthy sex life. It also hits very close to home. Given how much I loathed myself for desiring other boys when I was in high school, I fear I would have suffered the same fate had transition been on offer back then.
Why don’t most gay men recognize that the genderists are deeply homophobic? In his excellent new book Gay Shame, Gareth Roberts tries to account for the surprising support gays have shown for gender identity ideology, as individuals and through their dominant support organizations: “I think it’s a combination of social contagion—it’s low-status and gauche to object—and a deep-seated clinging to … cultural stereotyping.” He describes it as a “dissociation from the reality of homosexuality. That we aren’t ‘really’ men; that there’s something wrong that needs correcting” (p. 127). That sounds a lot like shame to me … or internalized homophobia if you prefer.
I used to serve as an officer and board director of my local LGB(TQ+) center in California. Years ago, when I began to work with detransitioners and dysphoric teens in my practice, I wrote my first paper about the role of shame in driving the wish to transition. I showed it to both the board chair and the CEO, two men I considered my friends, and offered to step down from my dual role because I knew my “transphobic” views would incense young activist employees at the Center. They readily accepted my resignation and have since persistently ignored my emails, almost as if I no longer exist. Within minutes I lost an entire friend group.
Since then, in conversation with other gay friends, I try appealing to their concern for the kids caught up in this homophobic social contagion. “Remember how much you didn’t want to be gay when you were a teenager? Don’t you think you would’ve jumped at the chance to become a ‘normal’ woman instead?” Over time, I’ve managed to “peak” a few of them. I’ve written to several female friends about the well-known phenomenon of “disappearing lesbians” (middle-aged butch women who decide to go on testosterone late in life) but they won’t acknowledge that internalized homophobia is what drives it. No one will speak out because they’re afraid of being cancelled like me, or perhaps because they’re true believers.
Meanwhile, much of the good will and social acceptance we earned and which culminated in Obergefell has begun to erode.
I believe it’s more than a fear of appearing gauche that drives support for this homophobic ideology, at least in the United States; it’s partisan politics and a self-righteous conviction that they’re the good guys, and on the right side of history. If red states are passing laws that ban affirmative care for minors, then blue states must adopt the opposite position. Red = bad, blue = good.
In the future, when they can no longer avoid acknowledging the greatest medical scandal of our generation, most of the gay men who supported the genderists will find it hard to acknowledge they were wrong.
“We didn’t know,” they’ll say (if they bother to say anything).
Who wants to admit he behaved in a cowardly way and just “went along to get along” … despite many warnings from a knowledgeable friend?
To my mind, gays and lesbians who support the genderists should feel ashamed of being cowardly conformists, and I hope that one day they will. Some forms of shame are deserved and have nothing to do with internalized homophobia.
By: Helen McArdle
Published: May 7, 2024
The chair of the Cass Review has told MSPs she was "surprised" by persistent levels of homophobia as well as transphobia during her review into gender identity services, as she noted that a "very high percentage" of the young people seeking help are same-sex attracted.
Giving evidence to Holyrood's Health and Social Care Committee, Dr Hilary Cass said it was easy to see "how the two things could get conflated".
She added: "This may have been naive, but one of the things that I was surprised about in conducting this review is how much homophobia there still is as well as transphobia, so we do have to support people in being able to express and understand their sexuality as well as their gender identity."
Dr Cass, whose 388-page report published in April concluded that the evidence for prescribing puberty blockers and hormone treatments to under-18s with gender distress was "remarkably weak", said that it is unclear how many patients have gone on to de-transition in adulthood due to the lack of long-term follow-up studies and because individuals who regret it "don't necessarily come back to the NHS".
She said: "That is a significant problem, but I think it's more subtle than that because for example I spoke to a young adult who started to transition very early - male to female.
"She's doing well, she had puberty blockers at the earliest stage, she had feminising hormones at the earliest stage and she passes very well as a woman, but with hindsight she knows she was a boy with intense internalised homophobia and was gay.
"But at this point in her life she's clearly not going to de-transition."
[ The majority of referrals are for birth-registered females aged 12-17 (Image: Cass Review) ]
When the first NHS gender identity service was established at London's Tavistock clinic in 1989, it saw fewer than 10 children per year - mostly birth-registered males who identified as female.
Between 2018 and 2022, it was receiving thousands of referrals a year for under-18s, 73% of whom were birth-registered females.
The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow - Scotland's only NHS gender identity service for children and adolescents - has experienced a similar shift and surge in demand, with more than 1000 under-18s waiting for their first appointment with waiting times of over four years and a majority of the demand coming those seeking female-to-male transition.
Dr Cass told MSPs that the changing profile of this cohort meant it was even harder to draw conclusions from existing evidence about the long-term consequences of puberty blockers.
She added that this group of young patients also had to be considered "within the broader context of what's happening to adolescence in Gen Z" - those born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s.
Dr Cass said: "We know that there are very high rates of depression and anxiety, there are stresses that previous generations didn't have growing up in terms of social media, and expectations on young people that arise from that early exposure to pornography.
"We don't know what any of those do to how you might present your [gender] distress.
"Certainly for some young people, that distress or feeling that you don't fit what you perceive to be the expected gender norms may manifest through questioning your gender identity.
"That's why we have to take this as a new cohort and not rely on previous research, and work with young people to help them unpick all of those things that may have led to that gender distress."
The Sandyford clinic has suspended the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to any new patients under-18 following the publication of the Cass Review, but the restriction only applies to the NHS.
Dr Cass told MSPs that she had "really deep concerns" about private providers continuing to provide drugs off-label, and said that self-medication by young people was "happening way more than we would wish".
The Cass Review recommended a ban on puberty blockers to under-16s except within the context of clinical trials, and advised "extreme caution" in administering cross-sex hormones to 16 and 17-year-olds.
A clinical trial into puberty blockers is currently under development in England, and is expected to incorporate sites in Scotland and internationally.
Dr Cass told MSPs that the review's findings had been distorted by "significant misinformation", including the false claim that 98% of studies into puberty blockers and hormone treatments had been disregarded and only randomised control trials were included.
"Both of those things are wrong," she said.
Of the 102 research papers identified for puberty blockers and hormone treatments, none were randomised control trials but two were rated high quality and around 50 of moderate quality.
These were all included in the analysis.
Weaknesses tended to include follow-up periods which were too short, patients dropping out over time, or inappropriate control groups, said Dr Cass.
"It was a very poor literature compared to most other literature, including in children's healthcare practice, so that was quite striking," she said.
Dr Cass stressed that medical transition was "a really important option" for youngsters whose trans identity would be long-term and enduring, but the difficult is correctly distinguishing those individuals from patients whose distress is rooted in other factors such as unhappiness with their sexuality, undiagnosed neurodiversity, family breakdown, and mental health.
She said: "Medical transition does not come without costs in terms of effects on sexual function, fertility, knowns and unknowns about long term bone health, the limitations of surgery...it's a high cost to pay if, in the longer term, you don't [have a stable trans identity].
"Picking that sweet point where you have a high level of certainty that you're giving the treatment to the right people is very important.
"And the group that we have least understanding about is the group that we are most commonly seeing now in clinic, which is birth-registered females who are presenting in adolescence for whom there may be a range of other factors driving their gender-related distress."
By: Helen Dale
Published: Apr 29, 2024
When scriptwriter Gareth Roberts was 14, he called a helpline promoted by a new organisation, one dedicated to helping gay and lesbian youth. The operator tried to set him up on a date with a 19-year-old. Fortunately, the young Roberts had the wit to realise this ‘was a very bad idea’.
A related organisation opened the first – and, at the time, only gay youth club in the country. Roberts joined, only to discover meeting rooms and communal areas littered with literature from PIE. That, for readers who aren’t gay or lesbian and of a certain vintage, stands for ‘Paedophile Information Exchange’.
What you need to understand – as Roberts argues in his first book, Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia – is ‘that there was a prominent streak of gay activism that was absolutely insane’. And, despite major successes borne of both a mature response to the AIDS crisis and opposition to Section 28, the bonkers quality never went away. That said, he admits he didn’t expect ‘the gay rights movement transmogrifying into a cross between the Church of Scientology, Heathers: the Musical and Act 4 of The Crucible’.
In Gay Shame, Roberts does two things. First, he explains how and why trans activism has become the ‘official’ gay rights movement that now (bitterly) divides gays and lesbians. It’s impossible not to notice the extent to which fights over trans issues often involve two opposed teams of homosexuals: Stonewall vs LGB Alliance. Roberts is a gay man and directs ordnance (for the most part) at gay men while also contextualising this division in an intelligent way. However, when feminist and lesbian adherents of the religion he calls ‘genderism’ cross his radar, they cop a similarly witty serve.
Secondly – and in a way that tracks the careful evidence-gathering of the Cass Review – he conveys the extent to which transgenderism represents ‘transing the gay away’. Most of the children who went through the Tavistock – 9,000 of them in all according to Cass – were same-sex attracted or simply gender nonconforming. Rising numbers, year-on-year, of glittery, swishy little boys and even more sporty but quirky little girls.
‘This is an ideology,’ Roberts points out in a coruscating passage, ‘that says there is something wrong with camp little boys and butch little girls and that they need to be fixed’.
This is impressive despite its grimness. Gay Shame only came out last Thursday, and – due to typical lead-times in publishing – was written in 2023. Despite a stint as a writer for Dr Who, Roberts didn’t nick the Tardis and get early access to the Cass report. This care and foresight has the effect of forcing readers – both heterosexual and homosexual – to think about how we respond to gender nonconforming behaviour.
Most people do not understand what it’s like to be gender nonconforming or appreciate the extent to which gender nonconforming people stick out like sore thumbs. Gays, lesbians and bisexuals won social acceptance before everyone else properly ‘got’ us. Roberts’ hands must be a mess, because he grasps every bloody nettle on the gay male side of the equation: from the extent to which gay male sexuality is utterly unlike straight male sexuality (because it does not involve women) to taking aim at a string of overpraised, low-quality gay male contributions to popular culture.
Does that mean every gay man on the planet sleeps around and adores Eurovision? No, of course not, but there are also no lesbian chemsex parties and heterosexuals really don’t have to pretend Eurovision is bloody marvellous. Meanwhile, if a straight man wanted some sort of chemsex equivalent, it would involve handing over a lot of cash to a group of women he doesn’t know in icky bits of London he would prefer not to frequent.
This absence of theory of mind – common but not universal when dealing with people unlike oneself – has implications. In a discussion of what he concedes is ‘a small minority of gay men,’ Roberts observes how ‘the Metropolitan Police’s shockingly inept handling of the case of the serial rapist and murderer Stephen Port in London in 2014/15 was partly down to their assumptions about the chemsex deaths of gay men’.
Of value is Roberts’ account of what he calls ‘the fall of Stonewall’, which was, in retrospect, astonishingly swift. ‘You can literally narrow it down to about three weeks in late 2014,’ he told me last week. He documents the extent to which Stonewall’s pivot to trans activism arose in part because it fell for queer theory (‘peer review is the process by which academics mark each other’s homework,’ he observes, tartly) and partly because it had won. ‘What was Stonewall for?’ Roberts asks. ‘It had no active political campaigns left to fight in the UK. But it had a huge staff, and a massive engine room of fundraising and campaigning machinery. A tender full of coal and no track’.
One effect of Stonewall’s pivot – and later persecution, along with Mermaids, of the LGB Alliance – was that the latter organisation spent years fighting off attacks on its charitable status, unable to do much else. Only recently has it been able to work normally, ‘doing,’ as Roberts says, ‘exactly the same work as Stonewall did before its fall to genderism’.
Gay Shame raises all sorts of difficult questions. It’s really striking, for example, what a recurrent feature the sexualising of children is within allegedly ‘liberatory’ streams of thought. This manifests in something Roberts calls ‘The Leap’. The Leap consists of the belief that ‘people (including, incredibly, children) are always what they claim to be, rather than what they are’.
Roberts’ discussion of gay men and gay male sexuality – and of male and female gender nonconformity more widely – also serves to remind the rest of us that we know very little about homosexuality. I know loads of ‘right-on’ straight parents who bought their son girl toys or their daughter boy toys. The kids simply blew them off. This, I’m afraid, is because most children are gender conforming. Gender has biological roots: the stereotyped behaviours it produces mean that deviations are really going to show. The thing is, gender nonconforming behaviour and the homosexuality and bisexuality that often accompany it also have biological roots, but we don’t know why.
In biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that’s a by-product of some other evolved characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. It’s a term borrowed from cathedral architecture, where it refers to something decorative, but which provides no structural support. Maybe some homosexuals don’t mind the idea that we’re just the fancy bit at the corner of an arch, but we’re too common to be an evolutionary spandrel. We exist for a reason. Why would evolution throw up a group of people of both sexes who are attracted to their own sex? Not exactly going to contribute to reproducing the species, are we?
Gareth Roberts isn’t sure that ‘genderism’ will collapse. At the end of Gay Shame, he presents two plausible scenarios. One depicts a world where queer theory and all its works and all its ways has gone down the long slide and all seems well. The other shows what things look like in the event of a genderist win. And in that world, the grim joke that emerged among staff at the Tavistock has come true. There are no gay people left.
By: Lisa Selin Davis and LGB Courage Coalition
Published: Apr 25, 2024
“Every major medical association supports gender-affirming care.” You’ve likely heard this talking point from activist organizations defending gender medicine for children and adolescents: puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sometimes surgery to treat gender dysphoria.
I don’t deny that American medical associations—advocacy groups that support clinicians—take this position. But I do argue that the position is not rooted in science or reality, and that it can harm the very patients it purports to help—especially gender nonconforming and gay and lesbian young people.
Now, a nearly 400-page report, commissioned by England’s National Health Service, backs these assertions up.
The Cass Review, which took four years to complete, comes in response to complaints about the only public youth gender clinic in England and Wales, Gender Identity Development Service, or GIDS, which was shut down last year—that they were fast-tracking kids into irreversible medical interventions, and that the culture of fear prevented concerned clinicians from speaking up. Cass and her team needed to understand the current landscape to come up with a plan to fix it. So they listened to trans people, detransitioners, therapists who feel pressure to affirm, doctors who passionately support these treatments, and many others with differing opinions. They also commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence about both psychological and medical interventions.
Here’s just some of what they found:
• No one had followed up with the 9,000 children who’d gone through the service—and, shockingly, the adult gender clinic would not share the data about how they fared later.
• There was no clinical consensus about how to treat them. “Clinicians who have spent many years working in gender clinics have drawn very different conclusions from their clinical experience about the best way to support young people with gender-related distress,” Cass wrote.
• The evidence to support medical transition for youth was “remarkably weak.” “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass admitted. That includes the evidence around the use of puberty blockers, which the NHS has now largely banned, and their effects on bone health, brain development, and fertility.
• Of great importance is what some of that stronger evidence showed: a correlation between child-onset gender dysphoria and later homosexuality. “The majority of these children [in the studies] became same-sex attracted, cisgender adults,” Cass writes. In the one Dutch study upon which all gender medicine is based, 89 percent of the young people who transitioned “were same-sex attracted to their birth-registered sex, with most of the rest being bisexual. Only one patient was exclusively heterosexual.”
Some parents had told Cass that their children had “been through a period of trans identification before recognising that they were cisgender same-sex attracted. Similar narratives were heard from cisgender adults.” Among the studies cited in the Review is one of almost 3,000 adolescents, whose high amount of “gender non-contentedness” in early adolescence had declined by early adulthood—but that non-contentedness “was also more often associated with same-sex attraction.”
LGBT Courage Coalition co-founders Jamie Reed and Aaron Kimberly both experienced gender dysphoria as girls and adolescents. Both grew up to be same-sex attracted. Aaron went on to transition as an adult; Jamie went on to marry a trans man. My child is as gender nonconforming as Jamie and Aaron were—but no one can predict her future based on that. And perhaps her lack of gender dysphoria is related to growing up in a time and place and family in which that gender nonconformity is completely accepted, without anyone trying to make meaning from it.
Of great import to me as a parent is that most kids in the original cohort studied in the Netherlands were likely gay. But the medicines they received were the same as those once given to gay adults to punish them or cure them of their sexual proclivities. Somehow, these treatments are touted as being safe and effective for “LGBTQ+ kids,” but the reality is that they can sterilize and remove sexual function from same-sex attracted people—something they’ve been fighting for decades to stop.
Instead of talking openly about these hugely important issues with youth gender medicine, those who advocate for it have insisted on “no debate.” But debate we must. Because today, many more kinds of kids seek these interventions. There has been an “exponential change in referrals over a particularly short five-year timeframe,” Cass reports, with girls quite suddenly making up the bulk of patients, instead of boys—a shift that cannot be explained by increasing social acceptance. Meanwhile, children and adolescents “are on a developmental trajectory that continues to their mid-20s”—that is, it’s hard to make grand decisions during this long period of growth and change.
The youth cohort sheltered beneath the umbrella of “trans” is actually a heterogeneous group, and the inconvenient truth is that no one knows the best way to help them thrive. No one knows who they will grow up to be or how they will identify in adulthood. Nor does anyone know the benefits or harms of social transition, in which children adopt the gender identity that doesn’t correspond with their sex. “However, those who had socially transitioned at an earlier age and/or prior to being seen in clinic were more likely to proceed to a medical pathway,” Cass notes. That is, it is not a neutral intervention, but rather an active one that seems to increase the likelihood of medicalizing later.
Cass states clearly that “For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way” to achieve self-actualization. She supports expanding psychological support for those young people, and strict and standardized evaluations, in line with what several other European countries are doing. She demands long-term follow-up not only of anyone who will transition in the future, but of those who already have.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy and activist organization that appointed itself the generator of “standards of care”—and which England and other European countries are increasingly rejecting—directed people toward an opinion piece called “The Cass Review: Cis-supremacy in the UK’s approach to healthcare for trans children.” In other words, they dismiss the whole thing as bigotry. But Cass dismissed their own standards of care as lacking “developmental rigor.”
The NHS thanked Cass for her work and suggested that it may have international influence. I hope so, too. The report makes clear that the American affirmative model was a departure from a more cautious approach, and that even the cautious approach was based on substandard evidence—that modifying secondary sex characteristics in adolescents, or transitioning children to live as the opposite (or neither) sex was never fully supported by any high-quality research and became more about social justice than evidence. But medicine, Cass reminds us, is in fact evidence based. The issue is “about what the healthcare approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children” with gender distress. It is not about ideology.
We don’t have the same system in America. We don’t have the kind of centralized healthcare and state agencies to craft guidelines that all must follow. Here, we battle it out in the legislature, state by state, red against blue, based on moral worldviews more than evidence. So how will the Cass Review influence our toxic gender culture war? How will they affect the medical associations that craft guidelines and create policy statements?
I queried the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recently reaffirmed its commitment to the affirmative model; the American Psychiatric Association; and the American Psychological Association, which have pro-affirmation models statements of their own. Only the latter responded, and I spent over an hour talking to APA Senior Advisor, Psychology in the Public Interest, Clinton Anderson. He admitted to the low quality of evidence and said that there’s a fundamental tension between those who view transition as a social justice issue and those who advocate for a more cautious, evidence-based approach. Where does the APA land? “Our concern has been largely about a human rights issue, and the way this is treatment has become politicized in our system and used as a punishment against people for being different,” Anderson told me. “And that I think has to be seen as the biggest issue.”
I disagree. But I will say that Anderson listened to my points more than anyone at these institutions ever has. I urged him to take a closer look at the Cass Review, and to listen to those who’ve been hurt, not just those who feel they’ve been helped. Maybe, just maybe, he heard me. Maybe, just maybe, these associations hear the science-minded and nuanced words of the Cass Review.
By: David Bell
Published: Apr 26, 2024
As the dust settles around Hilary Cass’s report – the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencing gender distress ever undertaken – it is clear her findings support the grave concerns I and many others have raised. Central here was the lack of an evidential base of good quality that could back claims for the effectiveness of young people being prescribed puberty blockers or proceeding on a medical pathway to transition. I and many other clinicians were concerned about the risks of long-term damaging consequences of early medical intervention. Cass has already had to speak out against misinformation being spread about her review, and a Labour MP has admitted she “may have misled” Parliament when referring to it. The review should be defended from misrepresentation.
The policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior gender identity development service (Gids) staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children in the absence of medical intervention will desist – that is, change their minds.
The many complex problems that affect these young people were left unaddressed once they were viewed simplistically through the prism of gender. Cass helpfully calls this “diagnostic overshadowing”. Thus children suffered thrice over: through not having all their problems properly addressed; by being put on a pathway for which there is not adequate evidence and for which there is considerable risk of harm; and lastly because children not unreasonably believed that all their problems would disappear once they transitioned. It is, I think, not possible for a child in acute states of torment to be able to think through consequences of a future medical transition. Children struggle to even imagine themselves in an adult sexual body.
Some claim that low numbers of puberty blockers were prescribed. Cass quotes figures showing around 30% of Gids patients in England discharged between April 2018 and 31 December 2022 were referred to the endocrinology service, of whom around 80% were prescribed puberty blockers; the proportion was higher for older children. But these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, as 70% of children were transferred to adult services once they were 17, and their data lost, as very regrettably they were not followed up. This is one of the most serious governance problems of Gids – also specifically addressed by the judges in Keira Bell v Tavistock. Six adult gender clinics refused to cooperate and provide data to Cass. However, having come under considerable pressure, they have now relented.
It is often claimed that puberty blockers were not experimental, as there is a long history of their use. They had been used in precocious puberty (for example where a child, sometimes because of a pituitary abnormality, develops secondary sexual characteristics before the age of eight) and in the treatment of prostate cancer. But they had not been prescribed by Gids to children experiencing gender dysphoria before 2011. The lack of long-term evidence underlies the decision of the NHS to put an end to their routine prescription for children as a treatment for gender dysphoria – that is, for those whose bodies were physically healthy.
The attempts of Gids clinicians to raise concerns about safeguarding and the medical approach were ignored or worse.The then medical director heard concerns but did not act; ditto the Speak up Guardian and the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust management. I was a senior consultant psychiatrist, and it was in my role as staff representative on the trust council of governors that a large number of the Gids clinicians approached me with their grave concerns. This formed the basis of the report submitted to the board in 2018. The trust then conducted a “review” of Gids, based only on interviewing staff. The CEO stated that the review did not identify any “failings in the overall approach taken by the service in responding to the needs of the young people and families who access its support”. I was threatened with disciplinary action. When the child safeguarding lead, Sonia Appleby, raised her concerns before the trust’s review, the trust threatened her with an investigation; and its response, as an employment tribunal later confirmed, damaged her professional reputation and stood in the way of her safeguarding work.
Characterising a child as “being transgender” is harmful as it forecloses the situation and also implies that this is a unitary condition for which there is unitary “treatment”. It is much more helpful to use a description: that the child suffers from distress in relation to gender/sexuality, and this needs to be carefully explored in terms of the narrative of their lives, the presence of other difficulties such as autism, depression, histories of abuse and trauma, and confusion about sexuality. As the Cass report notes, studies suggest that a high proportion of these children are same-sex attracted, and many suffer from homophobia. Concerned gay and lesbian clinicians have said they experienced homophobia in the service, and that staff worked in a “climate of fear”.
It is misleading to suggest that I and others who have raised these concerns are hostile to transgender people – we believe they should be able to live their lives free of discrimination, and we want them to have safe, evidence-based holistic healthcare. What we have opposed is the precipitate placing of children on a potentially damaging medical pathway for which there is considerable evidence of risk of harm. We emphasised the need, before taking such steps, to spend considerable time exploring this complex and multifaceted clinical presentation. Young people and clinicians routinely refer to “top surgery” and “bottom surgery”, terms that serve to seriously underplay these major surgical procedures, ie double mastectomy, removal of pelvic organs and fashioning of constructed penis or vagina. These procedures carry very serious risks such as urinary incontinence, vaginal atrophy, cardiovascular complications and many others we are only beginning to learn about. There is a very serious risk of sexual dysfunction and sterility.
There are no reliable studies (for children or adults) that could support claims of low levels of regret. The studies often quoted (eg Bustos et al 2021) have been criticised for using inadequate and erroneous data. The critical issue here is the fact that children and young people who were put on a medical pathway were not followed up. Studies suggest that the majority of detransitioners, a growing population, who are having to deal with the consequences of having been put on a medical pathway, do not return to the clinics as they are very fearful of the consequences. The fact that there are no dedicated NHS services for detransitioners is symptomatic of the NHS’s lack of concern for this group. Many live very lonely and isolated lives.
Those who say a child has been “born in the wrong body”, and who have sidelined child safeguarding, bear a very heavy responsibility. Parents have been asked “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” Cass notes that rates of suicidality are similar to rates among non-trans identified youth referred to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Indeed, the NHS lead for suicide prevention, Prof Sir Louis Appleby, has said “invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken and potentially harmful”.
It has been suggested that the Cass report sought to “appease” various interests, with the implication that those who have promoted these potentially damaging treatments have been sidelined. But in reality, it is those of us who have raised these concerns who have been silenced by trans rights activists who have had considerable success in closing down debate, including preventing conferences going ahead. Doctors and scientists have said that they have been deterred from conducting studies in this area by a climate of fear, and faced great personal costs for speaking out, ranging from harassment to professional risks and even, as Cass has experienced, safety concerns in public.
The pendulum is already swinging towards a reassertion of rationality. Cass’s achievement is to give that pendulum a hugely increased momentum. In years to come we will look back at the damage done to children with incredulity and horror.
David Bell is a retired psychiatrist and former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society
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David Bell was one of the original Tavistock whistleblowers.
No one is "born in the wrong body." You and your body are one and the same.
By: Gay Men's Network
Published: April 2024
The final Cass Review is a devastating account of an unprecedented homophobic medical scandal in the NHS and private health sphere. Dr Cass details how an authoritarian brand of gender ideology came to replace evidence-based practice in the GIDS service. Whistleblowers like Susan Evans and Dr David Bell were silenced and cancelled. Brave detransitioner Keira Bell and Mrs A were forced to fight an arduous court case to expose elementary malpractice. Powerful former gay rights charities like Stonewall failed in their first duty of protecting samesex attracted youth, speaking in favour of a harmful ideology when they should have been opposing it. Those who did speak up for gay youth, like the LGB Alliance, were subject to misconceived and stressful litigation by ideological actors disinclined to discussion. The Cass Review may be a watershed moment for gay rights, but it is a damning indictment of gay politics that this reality check was ever necessary.
The recommendations of the Cass Review represent a return to the evidence-based norms of medicine. It is frankly terrifying they were ever abandoned in the first place. We wish to emphasise this was primarily a homophobic medical scandal. Staff at the Tavistock famously told a dark “joke” saying “soon there will be no gay people left”. Institutional homophobia must not be overlooked, edited out or erased from the post-Cass discussion. Homophobia ran riot because staff were too scared of accusations of transphobia.
With the exception that there be a clinical trial of puberty blockers, we welcome the recommendations of the Cass Review. Puberty is a human right and growing up into a welladjusted post-pubertal gay man is a gay right. Given mounting global evidence of testicular atrophy, increased testicular cancer risk, IQ deficits, osteoporosis, and more, GMN believes there are no circumstances in which a clinical trial having gay youth as live test subjects could be conscionable. We object to such in the strongest terms.
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Gender identity ideology: makes magical metaphysical claims about "essences" dissociated from physical reality; is profoundly anti-science; is authoritarian; is impervious to evidence; deems disbelievers to be heretics who are evil and dangerous; encourages adherents to separate from their normal relationships with family and friends; makes claims of an unattainable, incoherent utopia; regards the human body as a malleable, disposable vessel; reifies those who make the ultimate commitment; demonizes apostates (detransitioners); uses chanting and thought-terminating cliches ("TWAW"/"TMAM") to suppress doubt; pursues children as the most vulnerable and needing to be inducted.
It's a full-blown cult. And everybody has the right to freedom from this cult, like any religion.
It's not the end of gender ideology yet, but it's the beginning of the end.
We're reliably told that the notion this is a social contagion or that there is social media influence at play is some kind of far-right fever dream, that there was always this many "trans" people and now they're just coming out to be their "authentic selves."
It's not true, though.
#TransTheGayAway
By: Daniel Martin
Published: Feb 6, 2024
Kemi Badenoch has told MPs she has strong evidence that gay young people are being convinced they are transgender instead.
The equalities minister quoted experts who said children likely to grow up to be same-sex attracted “might be subjected to conversion practices” which persuade them to change gender.
In a letter to the Commons women and equalities select committee, she revealed a former clinician at the NHS Tavistock child gender identity clinic had said that in agreeing to requests to help children change gender, they were in fact “making them straight”.
Another said that agreeing to help a homosexual child change gender was in effect “conversion therapy for gay kids”.
Mrs Badenoch agreed to write to the committee to provide the evidence following an appearance before them last month.
Her letter shows that the number of children in England going to the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) has soared from 250 in 2011-12 to more than 5,000 in 2021-22.
She wrote: “I committed to providing further details on the evidence that children likely to grow up to be gay (same-sex attracted) might be subjected to conversion practices on the basis of gender identity rather than their sexual orientation.
“Both prospective and retrospective studies have found a link between gender non-conformity in childhood and someone later coming out as gay.
“A young person and their family may notice that they are gender non-conforming earlier than they are aware of their developing sexual orientation. If gender non-conformity is misinterpreted as evidence of being transgender and a child is medically affirmed, the child may not have had a chance to identify, come to terms with or explore a same-sex orientation.”
She cited the Dutch founders of a medical gender transition service from 1999, who stated: “Not all children with GID (gender identity disorder) turn out to be transsexuals after puberty…
“Prospective studies of GID boys show that this phenomenon is more strongly related to later homosexuality than to later transsexualism.”
One of the same authors said in 2012: “Follow-up studies have demonstrated that only a small proportion of gender dysphoric children become transsexual at a later age, that a much larger proportion have a homosexual sexual orientation without any gender dysphoria.”
Mrs Badenoch also pointed to English data from GIDS, showing that older patients expressing a sexual orientation were overwhelmingly lesbian, gay or bisexual.
For example, 68 per cent of adolescent female patients were recorded as being attracted to other females only, 21 per cent were bisexual and just 9 per cent were heterosexual.
Among adolescent male patients, 42 per cent were attracted only to other males, 38 per cent were bisexual and 19 per cent were only attracted to females.
She said she was aware of “troubling accounts” that some clinicians are hesitant to work in gender identity services because they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach.
She quoted Dr Natasha Prescott, a former GIDS clinician, who said in her exit interview from the Tavistock that “there is increasing concern that gender affirmative therapy, if applied unthinkingly, is reparative therapy against gay individuals, i.e. by making them straight”.
Dr Matt Bristow, a former GIDS clinician, said he had come to feel that GIDS was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids”.
Tavistock was closed two years ago.
The minister also quoted a survey of 100 “detransitioners” – people who have changed gender but then regretted it – which found the experience of homophobia or difficulty accepting themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual was expressed by 23 per cent of respondents as a reason for transition and subsequent detransition.
She quoted one German gender clinic as stating: “It must be understood that early hormone therapy may interfere with the patient’s development as a homosexual.
“This may not be in the interest of patients who, as a result of hormone therapy, can no longer have the decisive experiences that enable them to establish a homosexual identity.”
Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said: “LGB Alliance is delighted that the minister for equalities has recognised the concerns that we have been raising for a long time.
“The evidence is clear. The vast majority of young people being put onto irreversible medical pathways are attracted to their own sex.
“We are literally ‘transing the gay away’ when we should be helping them to understand and accept their sexuality and grow up to live happy, healthy lives as lesbians, gay men or bisexuals.”
Helen Joyce, from the women’s rights group Sex Matters, said: “It has been well-established for decades that children destined to grow up gay are far more likely than other children to be highly gender non-conforming in early youth.
“Such children need to be allowed to grow up in a safe, supportive environment, and to be allowed to discover their sexuality on their own timescale.
“Instead, trans ideology interprets gender non-conformity as a potential sign of a trans identity. This tragically misguided framing is today’s version of the historic atrocities of gay conversion therapy.”
[ Via: https://archive.today/bG6GF ]
